How many times a day do you enjoy walking your garden paths? Have you noticed how much more fulfilling these walks are in winter than in any other season of the year? There may be less color; the fragrances are fewer or more hidden; the sounds are clearer in the particular, but silent in the mass, more than the other six months of each year. However, in no other daytime can the forms of the uprights show...
Read More >>at least thus far fellow Northlanders..... Previous to yesterday the vast majority of my grounds was bare of snow. Where snow did exist, there was no accumulation, but only a dusting here or there in areas beyond the reach of the Sun. As most of you readers know, I am thoroughly in favor of our Twin Cities moving into Horticultural zone 5. In some grounds we are almost there, but msot of those grounds are...
Read More >>I have coyote preying on my grounds. The resident couple have produced a pup. We seldom see these folks, but they are there and we have quicky pictures to prove their settlement. In the thirty eight years of my residency here in suburban Minneapolis , I have been able to create and maintain a beautiful classic landscape garden. We live in a climate in which winter is the major landscape season, as long as all...
Read More >>The Bleak Season at my grounds last year began on Saturday, November 13 with a 32 inch dump of wet snow burying nearly every plant shorter than ten feet tall. This snow and a lot more following it lasted all winter long. There was no January thaw, the first in my memory causing drifts up to six feet making paths impassable. The snow was so deep I couldn't plow my body through the permasnow five feet deep where...
Read More >>This article should be considered a WARNING to any readers who planted or had us or anyone else plant new plant materials on your grounds since about the first of July this year in the Twin City area. We certainly had a number of rainfalls earlier in the year. Many were of the plundering type in which the downpour was overwhelming but not terribly helpful to landscape garden plants. Following these deluges, we have had...
Read More >>By habit northerners, including amateur and professional 'horticulture' oriented people refer to color in the autumn garden as any color but green. Red, pink, scarlet, orange, rust, chartreuse, gold, yellow, maroon, plum....you get the idea......green is never listed. This is mainly the habit, monkey see, monkey do. But there is another reason why these days greens have become so much more important in the art of landscape gardening. Over the past twenty five years the greatest numbers...
Read More >>Because of this present November being exceptionally dry, pleasant, beautiful, and void of a killing frost until last Wednesday night here in the Twin Cities, landscape gardeners have been able to spend more time than usual amid their garden plants. These following questions arise for all of us and our answers may vary from year to year. To water or not to water? Who expected the last part of October to be so dry?......and after...
Read More >>If you have been 'playing' in your landscape garden the past month you may have noticed that this October of our year, 2011, was special.....If so, why? My grounds throughout is at its most colorful best this early November than in all the 37 years I have lived here in the Hopkins area. It is a landscape garden about 1/2 acre in size, laid out over the years by my passion to create beauty in...
Read More >>I spent much of this gray day involved in my own landscape garden. I am loathe to call it work, for once I enter the space, I am too lost in its aura, too mesmerized to feel any labor. I become occupied and governed in deeds the space has captured me to do. Not all autumns are equal. In my space this October has been one of the most beautiful ever. Traditionally in the Twin City area, the...
Read More >>Since our monsoons of early summer, there has been a drought in the general Twin City area. For well established plants there generally shouldn't be much concern....as yet. For newly planted woody plants and perennials regular watering......that is reliable water availability is essential for survival. A prolonged period of drought has about the same effect on woody plants regardless of soil type. Plants will wilt and die sooner in sandy soils. They also recover sooner,...
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